Introduction to The Dawn of Everything

I just finished one of the best books of my life, and oh the inspiration it gave me! I think everyone should read it, especially those that have a thing for history because apparently, we’ve been getting it all wrong all this time. And it’s one of those things that once you’ve already read it, it all becomes so obvious but it never occurred to you to question the hegemonic narrative that we’ve been taught to believe. Well, I know not everyone is gonna read this 500+ page book so I’m going to do my best to provide a short summary/reflection of all the things that I believe to be most important in the book. I’ll try to do it by going through the chapters. This is the first one and it might take a while. But to start off, I would like to describe what I think the book is mainly about. You know how we have a narrative of history that is very linear and characterized by progress? So in the past humanity used to live in small bands of hunter-gatherers and were able to be egalitarian because of the size of the group and also because they just didn’t know better.  They were somehow less evolved than us and too stupid to organize themselves in more civilized manners. Then, with the discovery of agriculture, our societies started to grow in size and the only way we could manage to live in such societies was with hierarchies, bureaucracies, and authorities that would establish order. So this was the natural course of the world and we have to live with it, it can’t get any better than this. Well, that’s just bullshit apparently, and thank you so much Graeber & Wengrow for explaining to us how so. It truly is “a radical revision of everything!”

I will try to paraphrase most of the text and also comment on it, so I’m not taking credit for any of the ideas here, just saying. 

Chapter 1: Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood

This chapter builds up to the idea that asking questions about the origins of inequality is perhaps the wrong approach to understanding human history. Instead of making assumptions about an idyllic original state and trying to find an event in history that messed it up, perhaps we should be asking where we got stuck in the current state of affairs. They start out by acknowledging the fact that we don’t really know much about most of human history and the ordinary person doesn’t really have reason to dwell on it anyway. The questions we do ask concern how everything came to such a mess. What are “the reasons for war, greed, exploitation, systematic indifference to others’ suffering? Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?” So this is basically the everlasting debate on human nature and whether it’s inherently good or evil. And what a meaningless and fruitless debate. Can a fish be good or evil? “Good and evil are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with each other. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.” Nonetheless, we ask these questions anyway and there are myths that we are made to believe is the answer to them. The Christian one being the familiar story that we were once innocent until Eve committed the original sin which led to us falling from grace and to an existence where we constantly have to prove how good we are through our deeds. I think the same goes for other religions too. The updated version of this story can be traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and it goes like this: 

“Once upon a time, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence, in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small. It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution,’ and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ushering in ‘civilization’ and ‘the state’ —which also meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling in forms.”

For the only alternative and even worse explanation we turn to Hobbes. The original state according to Hobbes was not a pleasant one, people were horrible selfish creatures with every intention to hurt each other, living in a constant state of conflict where it was everyone against everyone. The only way we were able to escape this state is through the repressive mechanisms mentioned above like governments, courts, bureaucracies and police. 

Well, I think that this says more about Hobbes and masculinity than it does about human nature so advocates of this narrative should think long and hard about what kind of a person they are before attributing their own toxic masculinities to the whole human species. “Human society, in this view, is founded on he collective repression of our baser instincts, which becomes all the more necessary when humans are living in large numbers in the same place.” The only way “primitive” people were able to get along was “parental investment” and even in these societies there was never equality. “Hierarchy and domination, and cynical self-interest, have always been the basis of human society. It’s just that, collectively, we have learned it’s to our advantage to prioritize our long-term interests over our short-term instincts; or, better, to create laws that force us to confine our worst impulses to socially useful areas like the economy, while forbidding them everywhere else.”

The authors object to both accounts of the general course of human history because

  1. They simply aren’t true
  2. Have dire political implications
  3. And make the past needlessly dull.

So this part where they explain the purpose of the book, I’m just gonna quote it all because I think every single word is important and I can’t phrase it better.

“This book is an attempt to begin to tell another, more hopeful and more interesting story; one which, at the same time, takes better account of what the last few decades of research have taught us. Partly, this is a matter of bringing together evidence that has accumulated in archaelogy, anthropology and kindred disciplines; evidence that points towards a completely new account of how human societies developed over roughly the last 30,000 years. Almost all of this research goes against the familiar narrative, but too often the most remarkable discoveries remain confined to the work of specialists, or have to be teased out by reading between the lines of scientific publications… To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators.”

So in this book, the authors never claim to be revealing a universal truth of human nature or history. What they do do is present us with some pieces of the puzzle in order to shatter the narrow and problematic perspective that we already have and enable us to imagine a different story for our species, a plethora of possibilities, and perhaps even different futures. They set in motion a conceptual shift.

“To make that shift means retracing some of the initial steps that led to our modern notion of social evolution: the idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of development, each with their own characteristic technologies and forms of organization (hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on). As we will see, such notions have their roots in a conservative backlash against critiques of European civilization, which began to gain ground in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The origins of that critique, however, lie not with the philosophers of the Enlightenment (much though they initially admired and imitated it), but with indigenous commentators and observers of European society, such as the Native American (Huron-Wendat) statesman Kandiaronk.”

So what is the indigenous critique? I was super excited to learn this concept so let me tell you what I think it means. It means to step out of the Eurocentrism we have grown so accustomed to, and consider that perhaps non-European people have contributed to social thought just as much or maybe more than Europeans have. As a Turkish person, I have witnessed the weird way that non-Europeans drool over Western society. It’s sort of like a collective inferiority complex in which we just assume white blond people are better than us in just about every way imaginable. We’ve internalized white supremacy: they’re smarter, more disciplined, more beautiful, more civilized, more progressive and so on. And this bothers me so much, so I loved reading about the indigenous critique. It especially takes into consideration the contributions from the very indigenous people that Western philosophy has established as Rousseau’s angels or Hobbes’s devils. 

“Both positions preclude any real possibility of intellectual exchange, or even dialogue: it’s just as hard to debate someone who is considered diabolical as someone considered divine, as almost anything they think or say is likely to be deemed either irrelevant or deeply profound. Most of the people we will be considering in this book are long since dead. It is no longer possible to have any sort of conversation with them. We are nonetheless determined to write prehistory as if it consisted of people one would have been able to talk to, when they were still alive – who don’t just exist as paragons, specimens, sock-puppets or playthings of some inexorable law of history. There are, certainly, tendencies in history. Some are powerful; currents so strong that they are very difficult to swim against (though there always seem to be some who manage to do it anyway). But the only ‘laws’ are those we make up ourselves.”

Now let’s go into the political implications of these two narratives. The Hobbesian assumption about human nature may seem familiar from somewhere. Neoclassical economics maybe? 

“It is a foundational assumption of our economic system that humans are at base somewhat nasty and selfish creatures, basing their decisions on cynical, egoistic calculation rather than altruism or cooperation.” I’m actively trying to work against this little assumption here and the influence it has on just about everything is unbelievable. But stay tuned, I’m not letting it go. And Rousseau’s account forms the base of the thought that even though our current socioeconomic systems suck, it’s the best we can do and the only realistic goal we could have is to improve it a little bit. So it’s a reformative approach. And the authors think that the concept and very term of “inequality” plays a role in all this. Inequality is to blame, it is the reason we experience exploitation, subordination and are made to feel that our lives are not as valuable as wealthier lives. And inequality is an inextricable part of living in large, complex societies. The most we can do is lower the degree. The topic of inequality is booming nowadays, with little consensus on what it actually is and no actual solutions to it as far as I know. Apparently we’re even trying to calculate income levels and Gini coefficients for Palaeolithic mammoth hunters, which both turn out to be low. “It’s almost as if we feel some need to come up with mathematical formulae justifying the expression, already popular in the days of Rousseau, that in such societies ‘everyone was equal, because they were all equally poor.” That certainly is one argument I’ve come across myself and I have to say I thought it was funny that we actually approached this issue with Gini coefficients and income levels. 

“The ultimate effect of all these stories about an original state of innocence and equality, like the use of the term ‘inequality’ itself, is to make wistful pessimism about the human condition seem like common sense: the natural result of viewing ourselves through history’s broad lens. Yes, living in a truly egalitarian society might be possible if you’re a Pygmy or a Kalahari Bushman. But if you want to create a society of true equality today, you’re going to have to figure out a way to go back to becoming tiny bands of foragers again with no significant personal property. Since foragers require a pretty extensive territory to forage in, this would mean having to reduce the world’s population by something like 99.9 per cent. Otherwise, the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces; or, perhaps, to wangle a bit more wiggle room in which some of us can temporarily duck out of its way.”

So maybe it’s time to let go of such assumptions. When advocating for the design of alternative socioeconomic systems, and against capitalist realism, the most obvious driving thought for me was: out of all the infinite possibilities of social organization, why would capitalism be the only viable option? It’s ridiculous to assume that any of these infinite ways is the best, especially if you’ve barely experimented with others and the current one is destroying the world. And the same goes for such a boring linear account of history: 

“First of all, it’s bizarre to imagine that, say, during the roughly 10,000 (some would say more like 20,000) years in which people painted on the walls of Altamira, no one – not only in Altamira, but anywhere on earth – experimented with alternative forms of social organization. What’s the chance of that? Second of all, is not the capacity to experiment with different forms of social organization itself a quintessential part of what makes us human? That is, beings with the capacity for self-creation, even freedom? The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together… We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”

Uf that gives me goosebumps. Some agree that agriculture was the event where it all went wrong. Agriculture turned bands into tribes by enabling population growth. Property rights entailed the protection of these rights and disagreements over resources required for there to be some kind of leadership and the inevitable hierarchy and there was absolutely no way back etc etc. Jared Diamond offers us his opinion:

“Large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws. Alas for all of you readers who are anarchists and dream of living without any state government, those are the reasons why your dream is unrealistic: you’ll have to find some tiny band or tribe willing to accept you, where no one is a stranger, and where kings, presidents, and bureaucrats are unnecessary (Diamond).”

Thanks for the information. Luckily for us anarchists, this information has no scientific basis. There is actually no reason to believe that small societies must be egalitarian, or large ones hierarchical. In fact, the authors claim that even Rousseau never meant for these ideas to become groundwork for an evolutionary study of history. In his case it was mostly a thought experiment to explore a fundamental paradox of human politics: “how is it that our innate drive for freedom somehow leads us, time and again, on a ‘spontaneous march to inequality?’” He himself insisted that “one must not take the kind of research which we enter into as the pursuit of truths of history, but solely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better fitted to clarify the nature of things than to expose their actual origin…” Similarly Hobbes himself never claimed that “a war of all against all” had ever actually happened, in fact at best it might have been an allegory for England’s descent into civil war in the mid 17th century. 

“All ran towards their chains, believing that they were securing their liberty; for although they had reason enough to discern the advantages of a civil order, they did not have experience enough to foresee the dangers (Rousseau).”

The authors then turn to psychologist Steven Pinker, a modern Hobbesian who acknowledges that neither Hobbes nor Rouseau knew a thing about life before ‘civilization’ while also claiming that somehow Hobbes had gotten it right. He argues that our world today is far less violent and cruel than anything our ancestors ever experienced. Apparently we’re better off because modern nation states monopolize the legitimate use of violence to protect us. Whereas the “anarchic societies” of the past could only offer typically ‘nasty, brutish and short’ lives for most. Despite being a passionate advocate of science, the authors claim that he basically makes up the course of history as he goes along. And they provide an example of how cherrypicking evidence is problematic and easy to manipulate. Pinker apparently relies on the finding of Ötzi the Iceman, which is the body of a person who is believed to be murdered while walking on the Alps, due to various injuries found on the body and an arrow in the shoulder. But why should this one incident be representative of all of human prehistory? Take Romito 2, who had a severe condition of dwarfism that would have meant being an anomaly and being unable to participate in the hunting activities of the society. Despite overall low levels of health and nutrition, the community took extensive care of Romito 2 till early adulthood, sharing their food and even arranging a burial. And this isn’t an isolated case. Apparently archaeologists have found that burials from the Palaeolithic very frequently reveal bodies of people with health-related disabilities. So if we were to make claims based on statistical frequency we should be coming to the opposite conclusion that our species is a nurturing and care-giving species. However, the authors do not actually claim this but only mean to use this example as a demonstration of how easy it is to manipulate evidence with such a narrow perspective. In fact, apparently only mostly unusual individuals were buried at all during the Palaeolithic so this phenomenon probably needs a much more complex explanation.

So when it comes to cherrypicking evidence the Hobbes people go to the Yanomami, known as The Fierce People due to violent encounters between men for cultural and reproductive advantages. But apparently statistically the homicide rates are lower for this society than other Amerindian societies. But that’s not what’s important is it? What’s important is that this society was popularized as proof of primitive violence by the anthropologist that became famous for studying them (Napoleon Chagnon). The important point here is that the Yanomami are supposed to represent the “Hobbesian Trap” that human societies are bound to fall into if they don’t surrender themselves to the protection of nation states and the mechanisms that they entail, and meanwhile embrace the virtues of reason and self-control of a European civilizing process. But then there’s also that problem that the current ideals of freedom, equality and democracy are not products of Western tradition. The Enlightment thinkers who put forth these ideas did so in the mouths of foreigners, those that Western tradition has seen and perhaps still sees as savages.

“Why insist that all significant forms of human progress before the twentieth century can be attributed only to that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as ‘the white race’ (and now, generally, call themselves by its more accepted synonym, ‘Western civilization’)? There is simply no reason to make this move. It would be just as easy (actually, rather easier) to identify things that can be interpreted as the first stirrings of rationalism, legality, deliberative democracy and so forth all over the world, and only then tell the story of how they coalesced into the current global system… Insisting, to the contrary, that all good things come only from Europe ensures one’s work can be read as a retroactive apology for genocide, since (apparently for Pinker) the enslavement, rape, mass murder and destruction of whole civilizations – visited on the rest of the world by European powers – is just another example of humans comporting themselves as they always had; it was in no sense unusual. What was really significant, so this argument goes, is that it made possible the dissemination of what he takes to be ‘purely’ European notions of freedom, equality before the law, and human rights to the survivors.”

Pinker assures us that we should be happy with where humanity has come because all the statistics show that life is much better than it ever was for every one and in every way. Unless, like the authors remark, you’re Black or live in Syria for example. And there is a lot you could add to those examples. How can you be so blind to the experiences of those different from you? Of course life today is great for rich white men, it was designed to be that way and at the expense of everyone else. Well, the authors note quite accurately that this discussion boils down to measuring human happiness, a difficult feat. “About the only dependable way anyone has ever discovered to determine whether one way of living is really more satisfying, fulfilling, happy or otherwise preferable to any other is to allow people to fully experience both, give them a choice, then watch what they actually do.” Luckily there have been several instances of this in the past. The authors provide examples of Westerners being abducted or adopted by indigenous societies, then given a choice to go back, trying it and almost always returning to their indigenous homes. And when Amerindians are incorporated into European society through marriage or adoption, they too mostly return to their indigenous societies. From a private letter of Benjamin Franklin:

“When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

And here are some of the reasons stated by these people: 

“Some emphasized the virtues of freedom they found in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth. Others noted the ‘Indian’s’ reluctance ever to let anyone fall into a condition of poverty, hunger or destitution. It was not so much that they feared poverty themselves, but rather that they found life infinitely more pleasant in a society where no one else was in a position of abject misery (perhaps much as Oscar Wilde declared he was an advocate of socialism because he didn’t like having to look at poor people or listen to their stories)… “Western propagandists speak endlessly about equality of opportunity; these seem to have been societies where it actually existed. By far the most common reasons, however, had to do with the intensity of social bonds they experienced in Native American communities: qualities of mutual care, love and above all happiness, which they found impossible to replicate once back in European settings. ‘Security’ takes many forms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there’s the security of knowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if one is.”

And this quote is on how dull this narrative of history is and how sad it is that we lack the capacity to see that:

“One gets the sense that indigenous life was, to put it very crudely, just a lot more interesting than life in a ‘Western’ town or city, especially insofar as the latter involved long hours of monotonous, repetitive, conceptually empty activity. The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imagination than on the life itself. One of the most pernicious aspects of standard world-historical narratives is precisely that they dry everything up, reduce people to cardboard stereotypes, simplify the issues (are we inherently selfish and violent, or innately kind and co-operative?) in ways that themselves undermine, possibly even destroy, our sense of human possibility. ‘Noble’ savages are, ultimately, just as boring as savage ones; more to the point, neither actually exist. Helena Valero was herself adamant on this point. The Yanomami were not devils, she insisted, neither were they angels. They were human, like the rest of us.”

The authors acknowledge that simplification is a useful tool in social theory and science that enables us to isolate the specific thing we are interested in and dim down the complexity so that we can uncover patters that are otherwise invisible. What is problematic though, is that we often continue to keep that simplified perspective well beyond its use.

“If social scientists today continue to reduce past generations to simplistic, two-dimensional caricatures, it is not so much to show us anything original, but just because they feel that’s what social scientists are expected to do so as to appear ‘scientific’. The actual result is to impoverish history – and as a consequence, to impoverish our sense of possibility.”

They go on to illustrate this with an example. When looking at objects that have moved around large distances, many theorists take this to be evidence of primitive trade, of currencies, of commercialization, of markets because markets are universal. They then use this circular logic to claim that a form of capitalism must have always existed. “All such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about. But lack of imagination is not itself an argument.” They then give anthropological accounts of other reasons why these objects may have moved vast distances: Dreams or vision quests, traveling healers and entertainers, and women’s gambling. Or maybe something completely different that we just can’t imagine.

I would like to close this chapter with some thoughts. You know the question about whether or not the world is better off today than at any point in the past? It’s too broad of a question to mean much in my opinion but let’s just engage with it for a minute. So apparently statistics show that we’re doing better but we have to think long and hard about what those statistics even mean, what they represent and whether or not it even makes sense to try to answer this question. What are the arguments? Science has progressed so we live longer and healthier lives, the mortality rates are at an all-time low? We have eradicated war and disease? I don’t know if we can say that we live healthier lives because everyone around me appears to be suffering from at least one mental illness. We very often have no idea what we’re eating or drinking, we abuse everything from food to drugs to people to ourselves. We spend most of our adult lives working at a desk for companies that exploit our labor and very often treat us like shit and everyone I know is suffering from back pain. We’re in the 3rd year of a global pandemic and there’s talk of more to come if we keep going like this. Our nature is literally dying, cries for help from every corner of the world. There’s war in The Ukraine, and actually its not like it ever stopped it just shifted to less European places and is making a come back. And what about violence? Do we really think we got rid of it? Not only did we not get rid of physical violence in the forms of murder, suicide, homicide, femicide, genocide, rape etc. we also created more subtle every day versions of it: “whether its the violence of having to go all winter in an apartment that has no heat, whether it’s the violence of having to go to a hospital that doesn’t give you service and you end up dying anyway, you don’t die with a bullet necessarily but you die in other ways and that type of violence takes a lot more lives (Dope is Death).” The violence of being poor and getting stuck in vicious cycles that never let you go, the everyday psychological violence you experience in the workplace, the violence of being locked up in prison for voicing an opinion or just being yourself or simply for no reason at all, the violence a person experiences because they have no home, the violence of not being able to fulfill your own desires because you need to pay the rent. I don’t understand how these can be ignored. I don’t enjoy these thoughts but I think it’s a precursor for achieving any change at all to acknowledge that we don’t live in the best world possible. And I know that these topics are disturbing for some but ignoring them doesn’t fix them and I think the comfortable should wake up and get a little uncomfortable.

“In this book we will not only be presenting a new history of humankind, but inviting the reader into a new science of history, one that restores our ancestors to their full humanity. Rather than asking how we ended up unequal, we will start by asking how it was that ‘inequality’ became such an issue to begin with, then gradually build up an alternative narrative that corresponds more closely to our current state of knowledge. If humans did not spend 95 per cent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what did they imply? What was really happening in those periods we usually see as marking the emergence of ‘the state’? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities, than we tend to assume.”

So let this be the intro to the book and if you’re intrigued read it! I’ll do my best to provide a reflection/summary of every chapter but that’s a difficult feat for someone who barely has time to focus on her own passions so it will take time. I want to conclude by expressing that I have so much love for the authors for this invaluable contribution to humanity, they’re fucking amazing & brilliant & awe-inspiring and all of the good adjectives!

Subscribe to hexe
Receive the latest updates directly to your inbox.
Verification
This entry has been permanently stored onchain and signed by its creator.